“No!” Rose shouted, shrugging off my mother’s hands.
She got out of bed and stood in front of Mr. Giacomo. “Okay, give him back.”
Mr. Giacomo looked up at her, his eyes full of amazement. But she wouldn’t go away, she just stood there in front of him.
After a minute, his face as pale as a whitewashed wall, Mr. Giacomo gave her the baby.
“I’ll let you rest,” he said. He touched the corners of his eyes; he looked bewildered, almost ashamed.
My father called then, to ask how Rose was doing. I picked up the phone by the bedside as soon as I heard it ring. I heard him say, “Congratulations!” Then he asked to speak to my mother and she went out into the kitchen, to pick up the other phone.
“You hang up when you hear me on the line,” she said; and Mr. Giacomo followed her out.
I sensed she didn’t want me or Rose to hear what she had to say to my father; her lips were tight and she had that determined look she always wore when she anticipated an argument.
Late the next night, Rose came into my room to wake me up.
“Are you going to help me pack?” she asked me. “It’s time to go.”
“Yes,” I nodded, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
“Hurry,” she said, a false cheeriness in her voice. “I don’t want to be out there in the kitchen by myself.”
“I’ll get dressed,” and climbed out of bed.
“You’re my friend, right?”
“Yes I am, Rose,” I said. “I’ll be there in a second.”
In the kitchen, Rose showed me the bag she’d packed with dried peaches, provolone, and a cold omelet wrapped in butcher paper. “Train food is expensive,” she told me, widening her eyes. She walked slowly back and forth, the click of fastened suitcase locks.
My mother got me to sit cross-legged on a chair and she laid the baby across my lap.
“That’s Mr. Giacomo at the door,” she said, and she went out.
The baby’s breath smelled like watermelon.
What’s this in my lap? His eyes followed my finger: Hey, little fellow. It felt like he was waiting for me to do something, quiet. Maybe take him out and show him the village, introduce him to folks. He had the curious look of someone who wants to be shown around. Sometimes hikers climb to my cabin, amazed to find it here, amazed to find a girl so young living alone. I invite them in. I feel cautious, but the Forest Service expects me to welcome visitors. They touch the fire finder, finger the lace ruffle on my pillow case, touch the washed plate by the sink, touch my little row of books on the south sill, turn to look at all the landscape through the wide windows. And often they say nothing, then they thank me and they go.
I watched Rose spread the snowsuit my mother had found for her on the chrome-legged table. The metal zipper that she opened made the sound of an angry hummingbird. There was a sack for the newborn’s legs and a hood of two pink ears.
In the bedroom, before she fell asleep for the second time, we’d talked about where she was going. She was going to Field, the next stop on the train into the mountains, and she thought she might find work there. A cousin who worked in the hotel up there had said he’d help her out.
“What if you don’t like it in Field?” I’d asked.
“We’re not going to stay there,” she smiled.
“We’ll come back when it’s okay to come back.”
Now she opened her blouse, the child’s greedy, wrinkled mouth at her dark nipple. “It’s time to go,” she said, but she still sat there as if listening, her blouse open.
Mr. Giacomo came into the kitchen. He looked away when he saw Rose breast-feeding. He asked whether the baby was healthy, and my mother, who had followed him in, nodded.
“I can do nothing more,” she said, gazing at him.
He gave her a scared, little smile, as if to say, “Once again you’ve failed us.”
And he said, looking at my mother and then at Rose, “Well, thank you for everything you’ve done.”
Yet I could see him ask himself, What mistakes have I made, that have led me here? The crinkles at his eyes had deepened and paled with shame.
My father had walked up from the one vat mill. I could hear him kicking snow off his boots in the foyer.
When he came into the kitchen, rubbing his hands that were inflamed from the cold water in the pulp vat, Mr. Giacomo turned to go.
“On your way then, John?” my father asked.
“Yes,” he nodded.
“Come to say goodbye?”
“Yes,” he nodded again.
“How’s that house of yours coming along, the one down by the river?”
“I haven’t been there in awhile.”
“Not here to change Rose’s mind, I hope?”
My father went over to the kitchen sink to run warm water over his hands, his shoulders tight with anger. “You’re not a man to respect other people’s needs,” he said then.
Mr. Giacomo looked puzzled, almost frightened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Look,” he went on, “I’m only here to help. You don’t have a car to take Rose to the station. Take the taxi,” laying the keys on the table. “I can walk home from here.”
“Thank you,” he said to Rose again. “Thank you for considering our offer.” He bowed slightly to her and then he turned and walked out of the kitchen without looking at my parents.
When we left the yard in Johnny’s taxi, the Columbia Avenue streetlights had come on. There was the Giacomo café, the shades pulled. I watched the snow drift under the streetlamps and gather in the corners of the darkened avenue windows. Rose was quiet. Usually she would be chatting on about this or that. She didn’t turn round to look at me. She was holding herself still with the newborn in her lap, not looking to the right or left, absorbed by the street ahead.
My father called this taxi “the boat.”
“I’m taking you to the train in a boat!” he said. He didn’t want to say, “I’m taking you to the train in Johnny’s taxi.” I could feel he didn’t want to acknowledge a debt to Mr. Giacomo, however small.
That 1964 Chevrolet convertible felt like a river scow, solid and slow. Now my father was turning up 2nd Street towards the tracks, taking the hill in a wide arc, hands climbing on the wheel as he leaned to the left to make the car more stable.
We passed by high-peaked houses with darkened verandas. I knew who lived in those 2nd Street houses, in every one. The Camozzis and the Sandezs, the Staglianos and the one-armed yard worker Danny Ote. I knew their lives, their memories; I’d known them for as long as I could remember. I felt held by those memories, held where I belonged. In our village, I knew I’d be cared for when the time came for me to be cared for. That’s what Rose didn’t have, and that’s what she was looking for, I felt, starting with that baby in her arms.
Then I realized that Mr. Giacomo didn’t have the feeling of being welcome in our village either, though he and his wife have lived here for many years. It’s hard to say how I knew this. There was a wary deference in the way people chatted with him in the street or in his café. Everyone called him Mr. Giacomo.
While Rose went into the lit-up station to buy tickets, my father carried her suitcases to the platform. I saw her under the yellow light of the station’s tall windows, walking to the double doors that let out a vapour when they opened. I could hear the squeak of her suede boots in the new snow while she tried to walk in a normal, unaffected way. Carrying the newborn wrapped in a blanket, she stumbled once, tripped over her own feet.
My father gave me a twenty dollar bill. “Sweetheart, you look after her,” he said. “Help her get settled.” He wrote our phone number under the chin of the queen as if he thought that, once out of town, I’d never be able to remember it, then folded the bill twice before my eyes and drew my sleepy, half-frozen fingers out of my coat sleeve to close them over the folded bill.
All the anger and fear that I’d seen in his eyes when he’d found Mr. Giacomo in our ho
use had faded. “You’re right to get away,” he’d told Rose in the car. “Mr. Giacomo isn’t one to give up. Stubborn as a mule in the beginning, but he spoils everything he touches.” Then he asked me to go with her, to help her get settled.
Now he said, “Call me from Field.” He was such a quiet man; usually he hardly said anything. Soon after the Giacomo baby’s death, my mother told me that she didn’t know what to do with herself. All the joy had gone out of her work. Standing there on the platform, I felt her entire desolation. I understood then that trying to replace that lost baby with Rose’s wouldn’t heal my mother. I was torn between going with Rose or going home to her. You can never tell how much you really matter. The kind of difference you make.
My father, watching Rose return from the station, said, “You have to go with her.” He must have sensed my hesitation.
Carrying that baby, she was hurrying, and she looked at the same time vulnerable and alone, determined and scared.
She took me by the hand down the train corridor. We climbed into a narrow bed behind heavy curtains. I raised the blind to the lit-up platform that was rolling past at a walk, the clacking of the wheels and she on her side. Rose combed her hair while the newborn nursed at her breast. She had a nightshirt for me in a marbled green suitcase, warm from the stove where it had hung drying. Lying beside her I touched the little hollows in the small of her back that were the colour of pips left on raspberry canes after you pick the fruit.
The bed was narrow, and I felt pushed against the metal wall. The heavy curtain smelled of rug cleaner. Rose’s feet were icy cold on my ankles. She said, “We’re going,” and I could sense her smile in the dark. She was going away to her new life, eighteen years old. People talk about responsibility, being mature, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Mostly they mean, Do what I tell you. Outside I could see the dawn over the mountains through the flickering snow and when we went over the Palliser Bridge I saw my father’s mill upriver on the bank, snow-covered ice in the shallows. “Your feet smell, Lacey,” Rose said.
I saw that the toes of my socks were stained with blood and fluid. In the hurry to leave our house, I’d put on the shoes I’d had on when I’d pressed my knees into the small of Rose’s back during the birth. Some of the blood must have seeped into them. I climbed out of bed to throw away my socks in the washroom, scrub my shoes in the sink with hand soap. I couldn’t scrub them hard enough to get that smell off. I hooked one foot then another in the sink, scrubbing at my feet and between my toes with a facecloth till they were red.
When I returned to the train bed, Rose handed me her baby and said, “Walk him a bit for me, won’t you? I need to sleep.”
That child hardly weighed more than the winter blanket I wrapped him in, and I felt his toes wriggling. I was worried that he might wake up and that I wouldn’t know what to do. So I kept walking, afraid that he would cry.
We were standing on the metal plates between cars and I was watching the mountains through a window opening that had no glass in it. Snow hissed over the face of the mountain. We were slowly climbing out of the valley and I drew the blanket loosely over Senna’s face to keep him warm.
In the train bed she’d told me she’d decided to call him Senna.
I felt afraid without knowing why. In the village museum there are school photos from the 1920s: dirty-haired boys with wide, still eyes and girls with prim smiles, all out there in their faces — they had gone on to work in the sawmill or drugstore, marriage, the house on 4th Street, the kids, a trip to Scotland or Italy, piling up experiences like money deposited in a bank. Then a car accident or a heart attack, a funeral and a mossy stone, mostly the usual thing. It all made me feel so tired. But maybe a class photo, a bit of a second, was more than enough in any life, if you just paid attention to what you already have in your arms.
In the winter of 1964, when I was eleven, I sneaked out at night to go ice fishing on Olebar Lake. I took a flashlight and a yew wood reel. I had a mason jar of crayfish in my coat pocket. It was so cold that the ice hummed like a violin string and stars glittered like a thousand miles of mica. Alberto Braz had marked the hole he’d chopped in the ice with a bundle of sticks tied with a ribbon that shimmered in the starlight. It was a long way out there and quiet and once I heard the huff of a moose in the dark firs along the far point. No one else on the lake that night, all the fishing huts closed up. I cleared ice out of the hole with my bare hands; I ran around in circles to attract fish by underwater vibrations. I laid the flashlight down, set my line, and soon I was hauling in trout after trout, little things with a blue and green speckle on their sides and the smell of archival water on them. Soon I had a heaped pile at my side with the ones on the outside beginning to freeze. Hungry, they just kept taking the bait.
There was no one else out there to see how lucky I was that night.
I kept looking around for someone to see what was happening.
And then, all of a sudden, I saw myself and what I had at my feet: way too many, too quickly and without much effort. Looking at the poor little things, I felt my stomach turn. I cleared away the frozen ones, the light had already gone out of their eyes. Five or six in the middle of the stack were still alive. Heartsick, I let them go.
Now I heard the car door slide open and Rose was standing beside me. To stay awake, I’d rested my forehead against the metal wall. The wind in the window opening was numbing my ears. The forest ran by and the rock peaks above were just beginning to show. After a while she said, “Give me him, I can’t sleep.”
When she returned to the sleeping car, I felt the train slow between high, sooty banks. We were climbing into the mountains. I walked through the dining car past linen-covered tables with flower vases bracketed to the wall and on each a peach in a silver bowl. An unripe peach is hard and sounds like an empty wooden box. The skin of a ripe one bunches under your thumb. I was hungry and tucked one under my shirt.
Then, thinking of Rose, I felt she was in trouble.
I hurried, almost ran back to our sleeping car.
I was remembering how in the fall of ’68, Mr. Giacomo had paid us to find his horses that had come down from the alpage. I remembered that in the Slocan Gorge we could smell their grassy breath: his two buckskin horses were on the path. I could hear the clop of iron shoes and the suck of heavy shoes in the mud. They were coming down slowly, unsure, because the Palliser Range was buried in snow. In those days Mr. Giacomo was a trail guide, and he often took them into the mountains. They were coming down to their winter stables in the first snow.
“Lacey,” Rose said then, “it’s Mr. Giacomo’s horses.”
To let them approach, we stood by the path under the pines. I felt a warm muzzle brush my shoulder and arm. On their breath I could smell the sweet range grass that crackled when you walked through it. I could hear snow melting in the bearded moss that hung from the pines. The air had turned warm and it smelled of rain. Suddenly the horses tore away.
The clouds we’d seen south of there had gathered overhead. Hailstones raked through the pines. Shadows rolled over the mountainside and the air, suddenly cold, smelled like breath out of a well. We heard splintering wood in the trees across the ridge, then thunder heaved the forest floor.
I ran into the forest to press my forehead against a pine trunk. Whimpering, I locked my arms around the tree. Rose unlaced my fingers one by one.
“Look at me,” she said, backing down the path, gazing into my wild eyes and holding me steady in her gaze. My hands clutched hers like old roots.
And now on the train I felt the same way, and I went looking for her.
When I got to the observation car, I heard Rose talking. She was sitting on the carpeted platform under the glass dome at the rear. Until I was beside them, I couldn’t see that it was Mr. Giacomo she was talking with. He was wearing his sheepskin coat and riding boots. He was in one of those tall, cloth-covered observation chairs, his hands clasped between his knees. He must have walked to the station t
o get on the train before we did.
“You belong at home,” he told Rose, adding, “Honey, you’re leaving a good place behind.”
“You really don’t care about us,” Rose said.
“What will you do away, in Field?”
“I’m going to work in a hotel.” Rose looked at him defiantly.
“But who will look after your baby?”
Rose handed me the baby and unwrapped the cold omelet that she’d brought. She hurriedly and silently tore it to pieces to give me some. I could see her wrinkled brow and I saw her begin to hesitate.
So little warmth came through the blanket, it was almost like the baby wasn’t there; a hand floated up to touch my cheek. He reminded me of an owl I’d found on the Palliser road, stunned by a car. I’d covered it with a beach towel to carry it to the gravel shoulder, wings tucked under my arm next to my rib cage so that it couldn’t push them out. Though it was bigger than a cat, it weighed hardly anything, all feathers and hollow bones.
“We have to keep going,” I told her. “It’s what you wanted, remember?”
I could see that all her excitement at leaving for a new life was fading, worn away by her fear of being alone. There was a sudden desolation in her eyes. She was wrapping up the pieces of omelet that she’d left untouched, wrapping and unwrapping them as if not sure what to do with the food.
“Field is too far away, “ Mr. Giacomo nodded, watching her fumbling hands and mocking her gently. “Farther than Mrs. Hiraki’s.”
I hated his know-it-all patience then. He was trying to turn her around, turn her around with his mild confidence, his answers for every problem that she might have.
He was telling her that she could have the apartment above the Giacomo café and that she could work for him there. “Just a few afternoons a week to get you settled, then we’ll see from there. You can stay with us as long as you like. Lacey here can visit when she wants.”
“But he can’t have two mothers,” Mr. Giacomo advised her. “Don’t take away his good fortune.”
He smiled and leaned in to touch my knee, as if to tell me that he was right or maybe to show that I agreed with him. I pulled away, shrank back in my seat.
House of Spells Page 6
